“Willoughby, you mentioned them,—­those separations of two married.  You said, if they do not love . . .  Oh! say, is it not better—­instead of later?”

He took advantage of her modesty in speaking to exclaim.  “Where are we now?  Bride is bride, and wife is wife, and affianced is, in honour, wedded.  You cannot be released.  We are united.  Recognize it; united.  There is no possibility of releasing a wife!”

“Not if she ran . . . ?”

This was too direct to be histrionically misunderstood.  He had driven her to the extremity of more distinctly imagining the circumstance she had cited, and with that cleared view the desperate creature gloried in launching such a bolt at the man’s real or assumed insensibility as must, by shivering it, waken him.

But in a moment she stood in burning rose, with dimmed eyesight.  She saw his horror, and, seeing, shared it; shared just then only by seeing it; which led her to rejoice with the deepest of sighs that some shame was left in her.

“Ran? ran? ran?” he said as rapidly as he blinked.  “How? where? what idea . . . ?”

Close was he upon an explosion that would have sullied his conception of the purity of the younger members of the sex hauntingly.

That she, a young lady, maiden, of strictest education, should, and without his teaching, know that wives ran!—­know that by running they compelled their husbands to abandon pursuit, surrender possession!—­and that she should suggest it of herself as a wife!—­that she should speak of running!

His ideal, the common male Egoist ideal of a waxwork sex, would have been shocked to fragments had she spoken further to fill in the outlines of these awful interjections.

She was tempted:  for during the last few minutes the fire of her situation had enlightened her understanding upon a subject far from her as the ice-fields of the North a short while before; and the prospect offered to her courage if she would only outstare shame and seem at home in the doings of wickedness, was his loathing and dreading so vile a young woman.  She restrained herself; chiefly, after the first bridling of maidenly timidity, because she could not bear to lower the idea of her sex even in his esteem.

The door was open.  She had thoughts of flying out to breathe in an interval of truce.

She reflected on her situation hurriedly askance: 

“If one must go through this, to be disentangled from an engagement, what must it be to poor women seeking to be free of a marriage?”

Had she spoken it, Sir Willoughby might have learned that she was not so iniquitously wise of the things of this world as her mere sex’s instinct, roused to the intemperateness of a creature struggling with fetters, had made her appear in her dash to seize a weapon, indicated moreover by him.

Clara took up the old broken vow of women to vow it afresh:  “Never to any man will I give my hand.”